We study noncooperative games whose players are selfish, distributed users of a network and the game's objective is to optimize Quality of Service (QoS). Our classes of games are based on generally accepted realistic microeconomic market models of QoS provision, and unlike most other games that have been recently studied in this context, stability is not guaranteed for our class of games. Stability here refers to whether the game reaches a Nash equilibrium. Optimality is a measure of how close a Nash equilibrium is to optimizing a given objective function defined on game configuration. The overall goal is to determine a minimal set of static game rules based on pricing that result in stable and optimal QoS provision. The combination of stability and optimality opens an interesting direction of investigation. We give a new and general technique to establish stability and demonstrate a close trade-off between stability and optimality for our game classes. Additionally, these results directly give asimple, computationally efficient, self-organizing mechamism for stable and optimal QoS provision in natural cases.
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